FIG. 1 illustrates a typical graphical user interface 100 and FIG. 2 illustrates a typical process 200 of prior art social media posting.
The interface 100 comprises a news feed 101 comprising a plurality of posts in reverse chronological order. News feed 100 may comprise a lead post 102 by a first user and an associated plurality of reply posts 103 by other users in reply to the lead post 102. Each post 102 may comprise visual media 104 and may also comprise associated descriptive meta data 105. Users may be tagged in relation to each post 102, 103 with user tags 106. Categorisation hashtags (not shown) may also be associated with each post 102, 103.
The typical process 200 comprises the user capturing an image at step 201 using their mobile phone device and authoring a post at step 202. Authoring may comprise adding the associated meta data 105, tags 106 and the like at step 203.
At step 204, the post is uploaded to the social media server for inclusion within news feed post 101 at step 205.
Friends and tagged users may be notified by in-app notifications at step 206 and may view 207 the post in their own newsfeeds 101 at step 207. These other users may similarly add and upload post content at step 208 which updates 209 the news feed 101 with the various reply posts 103.
However, these graphical user interfaces 100 are problematic for the small electronic displays typical of mobile devices. As can be seen from FIG. 1, typical interfaces 100 require use of vertical scrollbars 106 to scroll through the various reply posts 103. Furthermore, given the limited screen size available, reply posts 103 are usually displayed in smaller format as compared to the main post 102, thereby being difficult to view clearly.
A need therefore exists to allow for the display of information in posts but does not require scrolling, page refreshes and the like.
Furthermore, it is difficult to group relevant content together using these graphical user interfaces 100 which rather simply display content in reverse chronological order. As such, these interfaces 100 may comprise the interposed display of unrelated content from other users, requiring the user to scroll between posts 102, 103 to view the relevantly-related content. Some social media platforms allow hashtags filtering for the grouping together of relevantly-related content. However, hashtag filtering is not generally employed for the reverse chronological posts of conventional newsfeeds 101.
A need therefore exists to allow the coherent display of related visual media without having to use hashtag filtering or the like.
Furthermore, prior art posting 200 is inherently suited for group/multicast communication and is not suited for bidirectional electronic communication between users, requiring users to resort to other means for such, such as instant messaging, email communication and the like.
A need therefore exists to allow for bidirectional communications between users using social media posts.
It is to be understood that, if any prior art information is referred to herein, such reference does not constitute an admission that the information forms part of the common general knowledge in the art, in Australia or any other country.